Put the slacker land to work
Calls for an organic garden on the White House lawn evoke WWII-era victory gardens

by Sharon Parker

Soon after President Barack Obama rises from his White House bed on the morning of January 21, he should pick up a shovel and start digging up the south lawn to plant an organic vegetable garden, say advocates of a growing movement to bring Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1943 victory garden back to the White House.

Actually, only Roger Doiron of Eat the View(www.eattheview.org) says that the garden should be started on Day One, and surely he must know that even in Washington, D.C.’s temperate climate, it’s still winter in January. The National Cherry Blossom Festival doesn’t even begin until March 28.

Calls to reintroduce vegetable gardening to the White House lawn go back to at least the year 2000, when California chef-gardener Alice Waters proposed it, and have been growing over the last year, spurred by websites like Eat the View and The Who Farm (The White House Organic Farm Project, www.thewhofarm.org).

The cause was joined this fall by Michael Pollan, author of “In Defense of Food” and other books. Toward the end of an 8,000-word article in The New York Times Magazine in October, Pollan includes a White House garden as one of many steps the new administration should take to reform our nation’s food and agriculture policy.

A White House vegetable garden is not unprecedented—the very first president to occupy the White House when it was completed in 1800, John Adams, added a vegetable garden to the landscape, according to the White House Historical Association. And then there was Eleanor’s famous victory garden, planted over the USDA’s objections, a few sources claim.

And even now, White House executive chef Walter Scheib told National Public Radio that when he started 11 years ago during the Clinton administration, a small organic garden grew on the roof, which he has since expanded. Scheib also says that Laura Bush has had a policy to use organic foods whenever possible in the White House kitchen.

But ripping out five acres of the south lawn, as Pollan advocates, is such an appealing notion, isn’t it? That vast carpet of turf, along with the other 23 million acres of lawn sprawling across this great nation (according to Eat the View) would be labeled “slacker land” by the National War Garden Commission of World War I, precurser to the better-known Victory Garden Program of World War II.

In 1917 Charles Lathrop Pack founded the War Garden Commission, which launched a national gardening movement to meet the food shortages overseas. 
As European farmers had left their fields to go fight, and their abandoned fields became battlegrounds, Europe faced a frightening food shortage. America therefore needed to export food to its allies, which led to food shortages at home. American citizens were called upon to help.

In his book, “The War Garden Victorious,” published in 1919, Pack explains: “The author, wishing, as every patriot wished, to do a war work which was actually necessary, which was essentially practical, and which would most certainly aid in making the war successful, conceived the idea in March, 1917, of inspiring the people of the United States to plant war gardens in order to increase the supply of food without the use of land already cultivated, of labor already engaged in agricultural work, of time devoted to other necessary occupations, and of transportation facilities which were already inadequate to the demands made upon them.”

And Americans dug in enthusiastically—at the start of the program in 1917, there were 3 million gardens in the country, according to the National War Garden Commission, and by 1918, the number had increased to more than 5 million. These patriotic gardeners became more sophisticated with experience and education, and the productivity of these gardens grew, as well, to yield more than 528.5 million pounds of produce in 1918, according to Pack.

These gardens were called war gardens and liberty gardens and were promoted with such slogans as “Every garden a munitions plant” and “Every garden a peace plant,” and, my favorite, “Put the slacker land to work.”

Pack stressed the importance of planting gardens in cities, recognizing that they were an asset both for the food they produced and for their aesthetic qualities. “Probably no other one enterprise will add more to a city’s beauty than gardening. Gardening, therefore, has double value. It both enriches and beautifies. By the same token it develops civic pride and community spirit,” he wrote.

Home vegetable gardening should not just be an emergency response to wartime food shortages, however, argued Pack, who was convinced that once Americans had been bit by the gardening bug, they wouldn’t want to stop. “The fact that such a vast number of American citizens took up this work shows that they appreciated the merit of it, and this is one of the reasons for the confident prediction that war gardening has come to stay.” he wrote.

Pack felt that it was important that American citizens continue to feed themselves from their own gardens so that American farmers could continue to export food to feed the world and, in so doing, prevent one of the potential causes of future wars: starvation.

Many of these gardens did continue and became essential again in the 1930s during the Great Depression. New York was one city that made a point of cultivating vacant lots and employing people through the WPA project to grow food for the needy.

In 1943, when Eleanor Roosevelt dug up the White House lawn, the Dowling Garden was started in South Minneapolis, and today it’s one of only two continuously cultivated victory gardens in the country (the other one is in Boston). According to Eric Hart in an article on the Dowling website, the Twin Cities had 130,000 victory gardens that year.

The area around the Dowling school actually had much more extensive gardens than what is there now, reports Hart, including the Eustis Gardens to the south, tended by the University of Minnesota. “The University of Minnesota (Eustis Gardens) appears to have taken a much more active interest in establishing and promoting Victory Gardens than the Minneapolis School District did (the Dowling gardens),” writes Hart.

Nationwide, about 20 million victory gardens yielded 40 percent of the nation’s vegetables. In Minnesota, nearly everybody on farms and in rural villages planted victory gardens, and about a third of city residents did likewise, according to Dave Kenney in “Minnesota Goes to War: The Home Front During World War II” (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2005).

Today, we are in the midst of a call to revive the patriotic ideal of victory gardens, a cause embraced by liberals and conservatives alike for a variety of reasons, from combating global warming (both by reducing demand for petrochemical agriculture and by the practice of organic gardening itself, which sequesters carbon) to democratizing organic food by making it available to everyone, regardless of means (it’s cheap when you grow it yourself!), to feeding the needy (Plant a Row for the Hungry, a project of the Garden Writers Association, www.gardenwriters.org/par).

While it would certainly be a grand gesture for the president to plant a victory garden on the south lawn, gardening has always been a true “grassroots” movement. And where the people lead, our leaders just might follow, especially after they bite into a homegrown tomato.